More Zen Products are Coming from AMD, Raven Ridge and Pinnacle Ridge are on the way

Ryzen 7 was sold out almost everywhere during pre-order which should be considered a successful launch. But the fact that motherboard makers still were not ready with the stock, this impact Ryzen launch in a negative way. Who would want to buy a CPU without a motherboard? This makes the launch of Ryzen 7 looks less appealing. So, after the not so successful launch of Ryzen 7, the highest level of Zen, AMD will follow with Ryzen 5. This Ryzen 5 comes with 2 different core count and 4 different SKUs and of course, lower price than the (more) expensive Ryzen 7. The date is scheduled for April 11, 2017. Just less than one month and we can expect AMD will scratch some CPU market with these budget friendly CPUs.

As you can see, Ryzen 5 comes with 4-Cores, 8-Threads SKUs and 6-Cores, 12-Threads configuration. The 4-Cores units priced aggressively low to strike the market where Intel Core i3 rules. Meanwhile, the 6-Cores units is clearly waging a war against Core i5. Judging from the Core count alone, we can clearly see that AMD will wipe Intel in multi threaded applications. Even AMD claims 69% better performance than Core i5-7600K in Cinebench. This claim suggests us that Ryzen 5 will wipe Core i7-7700K when any applications utilize all of its core and thread. We all have seen how majestic Ryzen 7 performance in multi threaded applications, making 8-Cores processor from Intel looks obsolete and awfully priced. So, kicking 4-Cores from Intel should be no trouble.

Unfortunately, Ryzen 5 1600X doesn’t ship with cooling solution. But at least AMD decided to provide cooling solution for Ryzen 5 1600, Ryzen 5 1500X, and Ryzen 5 1400. We have seen Wraith Spire come with Ryzen 7 1700. It will also come with Ryzen 5 1600 and Ryzen 5 1500X. For Ryzen 5 1400, it will come with Wraith Stealth, the weaker variant of Wraith cooler, engineered more to produce less noise. Should be enough to cool down a Quad-Core CPU because Ryzen doesn’t get too hot.

Of course, as we have already know, every Ryzen processor is unlocked for overclocking (if you used the right chipset). Even without overclocking, Ryzen 5 1400 will likely give Core i3-7350K a good beating due to its doubled core counts.

Anyway… Don’t be too happy. Because Intel still takes the lead when in comes to gaming. I am sure AMD will not be able to do anything about Intel being better in gaming at the moment. But it might change in the future when developers realized they shouldn’t look down on Zen architecture. After all, it was designed by Jim Keller who went through 2 years of meditation to reach this enlightenment.

I have checked multiple sources to get more information about this news. HEXUS.net stated that AMD has confirmed that Ryzen 5 is based on Ryzen 7 but with some of its core symmetrically disabled. Okay, let me explain this. Octa Core Ryzen 7 consists of two Core Complex or CCX. Each CCX has 4 CPU Cores. So, Octa Core Ryzen 7 is actual 4 + 4 Cores, Hexa Core Ryzen 5 is 3 + 3 Cores, and Quad Core Ryzen 5 is 2 + 2 Cores. The bad thing about this combination is the latency between 2 CCX. It is very small, but I am afraid it will impact negatively in resource demanding applications.

Anyway, that is all for 1st Generation Zen CPU, known as Summit Ridge. Now let’s move to the other Ridges.

We already know that 1st Generation AMD Zen APU is codenamed Raven Ridge. The details however, are very scarce. But this time, we got more light. Raven Ridge will pack 4 Zen Cores and 11 Vega Compute Units. Since Vega is a newer architecture than Polaris, we can expect Raven Ridge GPU to be slower than Radeon RX 460. After all, it only has 11 Compute Units. Not to mentioned that it still relies on DDR4 versus GDDR5 on Radeon RX 460. Not sure how this unit will be priced, but rumor this unit will come in 2H 2017. Perhaps Raven Ridge will be labelled as Ryzen 3. But that is purely my speculation. If AMD priced Raven Ridge below $170, then I am sure it will be so sweet for common users and entry level gamers.

Pinnacle Ridge is the successor of Summit Ridge, coming in 2018, can’t be more specific, but I suggest Q2 is the right launch time. This will packs 2nd Generation Zen Cores, still at up to 8 Cores configuration. I am sure Pinnacle Ridge will be manufactured using 14nm Finfet as well. I expect AMD will increase the ability to reach high clock speed and increase the IPC slightly. 4 GHz on Ryzen 7 is so meh. Especially compared to Intel chips which can reach higher clock speed with less pain to deal with. Hopefully, the gaming performance will be much better as well.